Fictional Realness: Towards a colloquial performance practice

This article develops the concept of a colloquial performance practice with the use of three examples: vernacular drag performance in Jennie Livingston's seminal documentary film on New York City ball culture Paris is Burning (1999), the “documentary fictions” of South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord, and the theoretical concept of a minor literature developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book on Kafka (1975).

By investigating the colloquial term "realness", which meant to “pass” as a specific gender or social class other than ones own, and which was incorporated into drag ball performance in the 80s and 90s, this article explores how realness functions as a repetitious device that deterritorialises (Deleuze and Guattari) the major language (“the real”) and subverts it from within, calling forth a new language (“realness”), and a new scene (the ballroom).

It argues that colloquial performances such as drag realness are a fictional inhabitation – an expansive force – rather than a reductive repetition that might be coopted into capitalism and thus need reterritorialising again. By pointing to the fictions already at play in the so called “real”, it proposes that colloquial performances such as realness produce difference in place of the subordinate repetitions of imitation and parody, which would keep realness subservient to “the real”. It then offers the term "fictional realness" as an extended framework to read (and question the ethics of reading) “exaggerated experience” in the irreverent and boorish performances of Die Antwoord.